They told me I could be anything I wanted to be… so I became fearless!

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I’m not saying you have to have it all seamlessly together to be loved. I actually think that real love grows when someone finds unspeakable beauty in the place you’ve been cut open. But the thing is, you can’t expect someone else to heal those wounds. They can love you and that love can facilitate healing, but you are the only person who can heal yourself. Nobody else will ever be able to alleviate your burdens. It may seem like it for a little while, but the brokenness of your foundation will always show eventually.

Yes, love is transformative and enlightening and humbling and probably the most real thing we can experience. It is responsible for a whole slew of miraculousness, but romantic love will not solve your problems. The high you get from the newness of someone will eventually subside, as it always does, and you’ll be left even…

There is a strange sort of unspoken theory that once a woman has been raped, sex is no longer a viable option for her. Sex has been replaced by trauma, fear, pain, and anxiety. I’m not saying this is never the case. Every survivor’s story and experience is different, but too often the assumption is that if you have been raped, you are sexually broken and forever unfixable. That sort of discourse is not healthy or empowering or even sympathetic. What I want to say is what I wish I had been told: rape is not a form of sex, it is a form of assault. Sex feels good. Assault is traumatizing. It is possible for sex to exist after rape because they are different experiences, just like it’s possible for you to still enjoy going out to eat even if you got food poisoning once. You might never go…

1) Be patient. When I was 23 I always felt this absurd need to draft quickly, edit very little, and send out the piece immediately. Just because you finished a 3,000 word story doesn’t mean you should submit it to the New Yorker an hour later. The time away from a piece of writing is time spent on the piece of writing.

2) It’s okay to not be writing. Guilt can be a motivator, sure, but when that guilt is clouding your story and ideas and generally fucking with you in a way that pushes you to write badly, it’s time to stop. I’m all for working hard and pushing through, but learn to forgive yourself and walk away sometimes. I once went an entire year without writing and it felt good.

3) Listen to editors who reject your work. Seems easy to just read a rejection and think, “fuck…

At some point in the next week or so you’re going to start to wonder why I haven’t texted you back or why I haven’t had even 45 seconds to compose you a short, sassy email. “I’m supposed to be the busy one,” you’ll think. You’re going to be even more confused when you reach out again, only to realize that our iMessage thread is becoming increasingly one-colored. Well, I don’t want to be passive aggressive with you, and I can’t adequately explain my frustration in 300 characters or less. So here, sir, (I’d call you out by name but I think I’ll leave that to Taylor Swift), is your answer.

You led me on. I thought we were on the same page. I thought when you called me “babe” and told me that talking to me makes your entire day better that you meant that you hadn’t put me…

Someone is going to touch your hand in a dark movie theater where a scary movie is playing but you can’t remember a single thing that happened in the story because you are too busy concentrating on your own breath and how close this person is to your body. They are going to reach out and touch you and it is going to feel like a thousand needles pushing into your skin at once, the kind of pain which is as much a thrill as it is an object of fear. You are going to forget how to breathe, how to look normal, how to pretend to be the person you were only a few seconds ago. And it will be good, but it won’t be love.

I dated a guy for a time who was very nice. We’re used to the descriptor “nice” as having become almost a euphemism…

I have been feeling guilty about wanting to stop seeing my therapist. While discussing this, she asked me if I am very concerned with how I affect other people. Strangely, this innocuous little question sent me reeling.

My first reaction was ,“No, that doesn’t resonate with me at all.”

We both paused, waiting for me to continue.

Magically, in the best way therapy can, this opened up a new avenue into my psyche, one I would not have discovered on my own. I proceeded slowly at first.

“I think…that I…am more concerned with how others affect me.” But that didn’t sound right. Did that mean I am completely self-absorbed? Goddess forbid! I wanted to find a shred of evidence that I did care how I affect others.

When I couldn’t immediately find any, I defensively declared that it is useless to be concerned about that because it would just guessing…